But ’tis an old and pleasant question, whether the soul of a wise man can be overcome by the strength of wine?

“Si munitae adhibet vim sapientiae.”

To what vanity does the good opinion we have of ourselves push us?  The most regular and most perfect soul in the world has but too much to do to keep itself upright, and from being overthrown by its own weakness.  There is not one of a thousand that is right and settled so much as one minute in a whole life, and that may not very well doubt, whether according to her natural condition she ever can be; but to join constancy to it is her utmost perfection; I mean when nothing should jostle and discompose her, which a thousand accidents may do.  ’Tis to much purpose that the great poet Lucretius keeps such a clatter with his philosophy, when, behold! he goes mad with a love philtre.  Is it to be imagined that an apoplexy will not stun Socrates as well as a porter?  Some men have forgotten their own names by the violence of a disease; and a slight wound has turned the judgment of others topsy-turvy.  Let him be as wise as he will, after all he is but a man; and than that what is there more frail, more miserable, or more nothing?  Wisdom does not force our natural dispositions,

               “Sudores itaque, et pallorem exsistere toto
               Corpore, et infringi linguam, vocemque aboriri,
               Caligare oculos, sonere aures, succidere artus,
               Demque concidere, ex animi terrore, videmus.”

["Sweat and paleness come over the whole body, the tongue is rendered powerless, the voice dies away, the eyes are darkened, there is ringing in the ears, the limbs sink under us by the influence of fear.”—­Lucretius, iii. 155.]

he must shut his eyes against the blow that threatens him; he must tremble upon the margin of a precipice, like a child; nature having reserved these light marks of her authority, not to be forced by our reason and the stoic virtue, to teach man his mortality and our weakness; he turns pale with fear, red with shame, and groans with the cholic, if not with desperate outcry, at least with hoarse and broken voice: 

“Humani a se nihil alienum putet.”

     ["Let him not think himself exempt from that which is incidental to
     men in general.”—­Terence, Heauton, i. 1, 25.]

The poets, that feign all things at pleasure, dare not acquit their greatest heroes of tears: 

          “Sic fatur lacrymans, classique immittit habenas.”

     ["Thus he speaks, weeping, and then sets sail with his fleet.” 
     —­Aeneid, vi. i.]

’Tis sufficient for a man to curb and moderate his inclinations, for totally to suppress them is not in him to do.  Even our great Plutarch, that excellent and perfect judge of human actions, when he sees Brutus and Torquatus kill their children, begins to doubt whether virtue could proceed so far, and to question whether these persons had not rather been stimulated by some other passion.—­[Plutarch, Life of Publicola, c. 3.] —­All actions exceeding the ordinary bounds are liable to sinister interpretation, for as much as our liking no more holds with what is above than with what is below it.